Palo Alto Stock Down 22% After Earnings

Palo Alto Networks’ stock was down 22 percent this morning after the company reported lower fiscal second-quarter revenues than expected and revealed its guidance for the rest of the year.

While the company reported revenue of $422.6 million — a 26 percent increase year-over-year — it was still significantly lower than BMO Capital Markets Analyst Keith Bachman’s initial estimate of $458.1 million.

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“We had thought that Palo Alto would report very modest upside to its January quarter, but Palo Alto missed our consensus estimates, which we believe was driven by both execution and competitive issues,” Bachman writes in a financial report this morning.

Bachman projects the company’s growth will continue to slow given the expense of its solutions.

Palo Alto’s high price point for its security products also contributed to its weaker revenue. And the company is also faced with increase competition from the likes of Cisco and Checkpoint Security, Bachman writes.

On yesterday’s call, company officials said its weaker performance was caused by lower productivity than it expected. In the past, the company’s strategy was driven by splitting territories based on customer size and marketing resources. And this quarter it ended up with more territory splits and segmentation than it could handle, which resulted in lower productivity and less accurate forecasts.

To mitigate some of these issues, the company is focused on reorganizing its account coverage model to provide more accountability and clarity, officials said. It also will be restructuring its investments in sales and marketing to align with this new model.

Looking into the company’s fiscal third quarter 2017, it expects its revenue to be in the range of $406 million to $416 million and non-GAAP earnings per share in the range of $0.54 to $0.56.

Wyatt Carlson is an Associate Editor with SDxCentral. Wyatt recently graduated from University of Colorado, Boulder with a B.S. in Journalism, a secondary major in philosophy, and a certificate in the Technology Arts & Media program. Wyatt has a background in writing business-news and entertainment. With SDxCentral, he is focused on network performance monitoring, security, and wireless.

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